One of my favorite game theory experiments is the Ultimatum Game. It involves two participants and a sum of money, let’s say a hundred dollars. Participant A gets to choose how the hundred bucks is divided. Participant B can choose to accept this offer or reject it. If they accept, both participants keep the cash as allotted. If Participant B rejects the offer, they both get nothing.

What tends to happen is that Participant A is more generous than you’d expect, because a split that’s too unfair will be rejected. You might think A could offer a dollar and keep 99 bucks for themselves, because something is better than nothing, but most participants know in their bones that B will punish this unfairness. After all, a dollar is a small price to pay for a dollop of revenge.

The problem with this experiment is that the absolute wealth involved is paltry, and it’s too expensive to do this experiment for real in a way that would test absolute vs. relative gains in wealth and fairness. Let’s say we asked two people to divide a hundred million dollars. Participant A offers 1 million and wants to keep 99 million for himself. Do you turn down a million dollars to teach someone a lesson? Not as quickly, right? Probably not at all. The injustice will be keenly felt (the relative wealth), but the life-changing absolute wealth will win out. Most people would choose to go home and cry into their stacks of cash.

Researches have found a clever way to test this theory without going broke: They conduct the Ultimatum Game in poor countries where hundreds of dollars have higher absolute value. One study found that a mere four weeks’ wages was enough to move the rejection rate almost to zero. It didn’t matter the percentage offered. This was too much money to pass up. Absolute wealth won. But these victories are bitter ones. The participants doing the splitting seem to understand that they have the power to abuse the needs of the poor to take more than their fair share. And get away with it.

Game theory experiments like this get at something in our DNA, something deep in the marrow of our bones. We make these calculations on the fly, and across cultures we seem to arrive at the same general solutions for very complex calculations of fairness, relative wealth, and absolute wealth. One of the outcomes of this research is the discovery that relative wealth is more important for feelings of overall social justice and injustice than absolute wealth. A common refrain these days is that the poor have never had it so good. You can be poor and not starving, poor and have a cell phone, poor and have a place to live, poor and own a car, all of which used to not be true.

We confuse being poor with absolute wealth. But how we measure our status and wealth are relative. Forgetting this has led to revolutions in the past. Ultimatum Games are played all the time across entire economies, with tax rates and rising inequality testing the power difference of absolute and relative wealth to see just how much people will take.

Yesterday I got to thinking about the same differences, but with morality instead of wealth. The germ of the idea came when I saw Mike Godwin himself temporarily suspend the law that bears his name. Godwin’s Law states that if an argument continues for a sufficient length of time, the chance that one party with compare the other to Hitler approaches 100%. Put another way: the longer we disagree, the more certain we can be that someone is going to call the other one a Nazi.

At this point in the discussion, it is often said that the Nazi-namer has lost or given up on the argument.

As children and infants are being held in cages along the US border, and comparisons to Nazis and Hitler run rampant, Godwin announced on Twitter that in this case, the comparison was apt. Whether or not this was meant to be taken literally is up for debate. Which is precisely the debate I began to have with myself. And it got me thinking about Nazis and these frequent comparisons. My conclusion is that comparing people to Nazis is quite often more rational than Godwin’s Law would lead us to believe. And the reason for that has to do with the difference between relative differences of morality and absolute differences of morality.

To understand this, we have to understand that Nazi ethics weren’t as far outside the mainstream of the 1930s as they are today. That is, the delta between the average human and the average Nazi was smaller then than it would be now. This is why comparisons to Nazis fall flat on their face. Nothing short of rounding up and killing six million people based on their ethnicity will work for an argument. So why do we often find ourselves comparing people to Hitler and Nazis, and feel justified in doing so? I think it’s because some people and behaviors are as outside respected norms as Nazis were in their day. And so the comparisons not only feel apt, they are apt.

Morality has changed rapidly in the last few centuries. Steven Pinker has done amazing work in this area, with his 2011 book THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE. He describes the norms of past ages in gruesome detail, because those norms were gruesome. People nailed cats to trees and set them on fire for entertainment. Regular folk, not sociopathic killers. People went to public executions and had a ball. They brought their kids. The rates of murder and rape were far higher in the past, and this appears to be true for as far back as we can measure.

As the 20th century opened, talk of eugenics (a fancy word for mass murder) was on the lips of politicians and intellectuals in high society. Germany’s T4 program to rid Germany of the mentally disabled was outside the norm, but only slightly. Similar programs were debated in the United States. Euthanizing the mentally disabled was roundly discussed, but only in Germany was it practiced. Other countries had to be satisfied with involuntary castration or lobotomies. Barbarisms such as this were not in short supply a mere generation or two ago. Anti-semitism was also socially accepted in way that it isn’t today (not to say it’s gone away, not by a long shot). All of this is to say that regular folk back then were a lot more like Hitler and the Nazis than we pretend to believe. The moral delta wasn’t as great as it seems. Godwin’s Law points out the absurdity of comparing the worst of that earlier time to the best of our time, a comparison that makes little sense.

But relatively speaking, these comparisons do feel true. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump might be the Hitlers of our age. Not because they kill in the same numbers, but because their actions and philosophies might be just as outside the norm of tolerable as Adolf’s were in the 30s. How to measure this is difficult. The fact that many feel it in their bones is significant. It’s like the Ultimatum Game. The mental calculus is opaque; what we see are the results.

Perhaps this has been a feature of the human condition for millenia. Abhorrent sociopaths come along who prey on our xenophobia and fear and rile up a segment of the tribe in order to assume power and enrich themselves, and many in the tribe can see that this person is wrong and must be stopped. They remind us of Ogg, that asshole our grandparents used to talk about. Ogg got us in that war with the Feather People, and that got damn ugly. We don’t need another Ogg. Okay, sure, this person isn’t literally doing the same things Ogg was doing, because we all decided that shit won’t be tolerated ever again, but you get the sense that if the rules were laxer, we’d have Ogg V2 on our hands.

I think this is what we mean when we make these comparisons. Hitler has become a mental representation of a repeated archetype. Separating this from the atrocities of the Holocaust are difficult. But today’s atrocities might have similar moral deltas, as we live in gentler times (measurably, despite what you might think). Godwin’s Law does not take these relative measures into account. It looks only at the objective measures. It makes the opposite assumption and commits the opposite error as the Ultimatum Game.

Donald Trump is not 1930s Hitler. There will hopefully never be another 1930s Hitler. But Donald Trump may very well be the 2018 Hitler. Future generations and comparisons will make that determination. My opinion is that the long view of history will not be kind to him or his followers. One day, we might need a new Law to make fun of those who compare the assholes of the future to Donald Trump. Because everyone in the future knows that nobody is that big of a dick anymore.

What would happen if all the agnostics, skeptics, and atheists out there were open and vocal about their secular lives? Would would happen if the vast majority of people admitted that their sense of morality came from internal and communal reasoning rather than from a religious text?

My best guess is that we’d recognize the United States as not very different from parts of the Middle East. A religious war would break out.

We saw what people did to America’s #1 sport just because players wouldn’t kneel to a flag and song. Imagine people no longer pretending to kneel to others’ made-up god.

I think most of our politicians pretend to have religious beliefs because of this fear. It means that many of us participate in a great ruse because we are scared of a minority of heavily armed theists who have a history of promoting and celebrating violence against minorities and women. We’re scared of what they might do if we stopped giving fealty to their deities.

Imagine if we taxed their houses of worship. Or if we demanded that they follow the Constitution by getting religion out of politics (no more mention of gods by elected officials, and no more national religious holidays). Imagine if we started treating all religions as equals in this country. Again, I think we’d see massive outbreaks of violence. These are people who lose their minds over Starbucks cup designs and the harmless words “Happy Holidays.”

If it’s true that violence would erupt if we pushed Christianity to the side, then it means we are living among an ISIS-like group of crazy people who only remain calm because we go along with their fantasies. We are in thrall to this minority of hardcore true believers. We are their intellectual captors.

No, I’m not talking about the recent crash in price, wiping out 50% of the value of something that shouldn’t have a lick of sane value in the first place. I’m talking about the very real and inevitable end of Bitcoin. It’s all about entropy and algorithms.

The number of Bitcoin is capped at 21 million. Once the 21 millionth coin is awarded, no more can be mined. That’s it. It’s a limitation built into the algorithm itself. Of course, you can change the algorithm, but then all the arguments of why Bitcoin is different go right away. Now you’re just printing money like the Fed, only you don’t have a continent of land and minerals to back up its value.

What’s more interesting to me is the fatal flaw of passwords. You have to protect your Bitcoin wallet passwords at all costs. Bitcoins are like bearer bonds. If you steal them, they’re yours. The rightful owner can’t get them back. And if you lose your password, you can’t retrieve them. There are already people freaking out because they mined Bitcoins years ago, when they were worth pennies, and now they can’t remember how to get their Bitcoins back. Not only that, but everyone who passes away without leaving their password behind means those Bitcoins are also gone forever. Poof.

Bitcoin was designed to fight inflation. The growth rate is capped by making mining more difficult over time, and the total number of coin is capped at 21 million, so a deflationary period is to be expected. What wasn’t accounted for in the algorithm (or any of the crazy hype about blockchain) is human fallibility. We can’t remember our passwords. We also refuse to plan appropriately for our deaths. We are going to keep losing Bitcoin, and it is going to go to the grave with us, until there is no Bitcoin left. This ratchets in only one direction.

The end of Bitcoin is as sure as the winking out of our sun, only it’ll happen a whole lot sooner. The max cap of Bitcoin, and the entropy of human recollection, mean that Bitcoin’s days are numbered, not just as a bubble, but as a thing with any kind of existence, real or imaginary.

If you write your passwords down, they can be stolen with no recourse. If you don’t, they’ll be lost for good one day. I didn’t think it was possible, but somehow the Winklevosses are going to look even dumber in the sequel.

I’m sitting here in Tasmania, on the other side of the world from the small farming town in which I grew up, reflecting on the wild adventure my life has become. This past year was one of the best of my life, even as it contained some of the most difficult things I’ve ever wrestled with. My father is bravely battling cancer. The country I love is taking what I feel to be massive steps backwards. I’ve spent many a dark hour thinking about what’s slowly slipping away.

But I also think about all the good to come. The next generation of young adults are more amazing than the last, and this trend seems universal and without end. The world and my country have survived far worse. There are great trends to focus on, such as the imminent death of coal and the ascension of cheap solar. Or the healing of the ozone layer. There are always problems to fix, but we should appreciate the problems that we solve along the way.

I spent a month of my year in the Galapagos, and my father joined me. We swam with giant sea turtles and hiked lava tubes with blue-footed boobies. This was just a year after sailing across the Atlantic Ocean with my dad. How many kids are this dumb lucky that they get to spend forty days straight with a parent — and a best friend — fulfilling a lifelong dream?

There is always good in the bad. I wrote a short story about this once. In the wake of losing my beloved dog, in one of my darkest of places, I began a novel that would eventually be about the redeeming power of hope. When I sign copies of WOOL for readers, I almost always write “Dare to hope” inside. The original self-published version of WOOL was dedicated to: Those who dare to hope. I think it’s the bravest thing we can do, have hope. 2018 should be a year in which we remind ourselves of this.

Bright days are ahead. They will follow nights that seem cold, dark, and lonely. This is how it’s always been.

I hope we can remember to share the good moments without it seeming that we aren’t aware of all that’s grave and serious. Laughter, joy, and positivity are critical now more than ever. Michelle and I are working on a website to celebrate just these things, a place of respite and peace where deep breaths can be enjoyed, quiet contemplation pursued, positivity embraced. It’s not a retreat from the world and its serious issues, but a way of regrouping, of fortifying ourselves for the good fight, and for appreciating the progress already made.

What I appreciate every day of my life is you. Not a single day goes by on Wayfinder that I don’t pause and appreciate what your support and readership have meant for me. It has made it possible for me to fulfill a lifelong dream of sailing around the world. Right now, that crazy book I wrote so many years ago, is in the top 100 on Amazon, still selling strong, still gaining word-of-mouth, still finding new readers who dare to hope. Thank you for that.

I look forward to the adventures ahead. I just put the finishing touches on my first draft for a WOOL TV pilot. An embarrassment of amazing offers have poured in, after getting the adaptation rights back from Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox last year. This project was always meant for TV. I just never had any hopes of anything actually getting made. I went with a big name, and a big offer, for the big screen, all because I never thought anything more would ever happen. I was too afraid to hope.

I’m going to try harder in 2018.

Thanks for everything. For the rest of January, WOOL will cost a measly $1.20. This novel has probably never held more societal significance than it does right now. I look forward to the new connections it makes with readers, the new friendships it brings, and the adventure it might take us along very, very soon…

Five years ago, I made the novelette WOOL available for free. Permanently. This is the short story that launched my career as a writer, and I wanted to make it available to as many readers as possible. When I discount my books, or make them free, I think about conversations I’ve had with authors about how we value our works. What I think is just as important as the value we place on our art is the value we place on its enjoyment.

Not everyone can afford to sate their reading habits. Library cards, used bookstores, and friends’ bookshelves are part of how we get by. There’s also Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, where most of my works can be found and read by KU subscribers. For everyone else, I try to keep my ebooks priced as low as possible. It’s not that I don’t value my craft; it’s that I value your readership.

On Friday, I noticed a surge in sales as readers unboxed their new Kindles. But even if you don’t have a Kindle, you can read these ebooks on pretty much any device with the Kindle app. Or you can order the paperback or audiobook if you please. It’s all up to you. If you’ve already read them all, feel free to share the news with a friend, or go see what other deals you can find. Most of all, keep reading. It’s what I value the most.

Also: Some very cool news coming your way soon about a new project I’m cooking up. It’s been inspired by the unbelievable reaction people have had to my Wayfinding series. This is a collection of works that I haven’t promoted much; it’s been a passion project that has somehow found its audience on its own. The first part of the series is free all week, and I look forward to sharing more about the ideas you’ll find in these books. Stay tuned!